IMPROFEST workshop: Comedy From Connection & Keeping it Honest - Joe Bill (USA)

Improfest Extended (a part of Improfest 2025)
with Alingsås impro

Comedy From Connection & Keeping it Honest (Weekend intensive)
The purpose of this workshop is first to explore comedy, not as the end goal in scenes but rather, comedy coming from your connectedness to yourself, your character and your partner as the
scene unfolds.

Day One will feel a lot like an acting class in Playing From the Inside Out. I’ll put you in repetitions with partners so you can feel how Listening With a Willingness to Change helps to move dialogue and the scene forward. I’ll also teach you the fundamentals of how to manage the harmony between your inner engineer and jazz musician to keep you present in your scenes.

The end of Day 1 and moving into Day 2 we will focus on specificity and flexibility of emotion (or disposition or psychological state) and how that affects our behavior, in honest response with each other. You will play in some scenarios that I give to you as well as some open scenes, where we’ll connect how “honest interactions” relate to believable, compelling acting. You will able to evoke a variety of emotions from yourselves and your scene partners while also mining from psychological depth. Finally we will apply this to Narrative Story and Long Form Formats, depending on the interests of the class. This workshop will be equally useful for actors and improvisers alike and will include some general and individual feedback.

Bio:
Joe Bill is widely regarded as one of the best teachers of Improvised Storytelling and Scenic, Longform & Duo Improvisation in North America today. He is one of the
founding members of Annoyance Theater Chicago where, for 12 years, he performed in and/or directed more than 60 different shows. Joe is ½ of the first touring Improv Duo in North America, BASSPROV, created in 2000 with Mark Sutton. They are still
performing at Festivals and theater engagements globally 24 years later. Since then Joe’s been touring all over the world teaching, directing, and improvising with several other amazing Duo Partners like Patti Stiles (Our Play), Jill Bernard (SCRAM!),
Stacey Hallal (Stacey & Joe, We Slept Together) Lee White (Paradigm), Heather Urquart (Blues Hammer), Felipe Ortiz (Les Disciplinos) and David Razowsky (Razowsky & Bill), ALL in different, original formats and styles. He is touring his solo
scripted show, written as he successfully took on and survived surgeries & chemo associated with 3 different cancers from late 2022 to early 2024, Joe Bill: Surviving Consciousness, (Lessons learned from Cancer, LSD & Michael Jordan) all over the U.S. and the world. In April 2024 he debuted it at the Auckland Imrprov Festival in Auckland, NZ. He has since preformed it at Festivals and Theaters across the USA and made his first recording of it at Unexpected Productions in Seattle in January 2025.

He is the creator and host of Story Chain, a virtual (and now sometimes live!), 90-minute, international story sharing event that he developed in 2020 during the Pandemic. He was the Director of Corporate Training at iO Chicago for 15 years and started training and performing there in 1985. He was a Guest Artist in Residence at The Second City Training Center & Conservatory where he taught intensives in Duo Improvisation and Improvisation for Actors for 10 years.

Joe has taught and performed on every continent on earth, except for Antarctica which remains on his bucket list.

(Workshopen kommer att hållas på engelska då Improfest är en internationell improvisationsteater-festival med inbjudna improvisatörer från hela världen.)